Last week, we were had a pleasure to attend WordCamp Raleigh 2011 and BlogWorld Expo New York 2011. This was the first time the BlogWorld Team held an event on the east coast, and we had a pleasure of attending. This was the second year straight that we attended WordCamp Raleigh. I was actually speaking in a panel at BlogWorld Expo with John Chow and Zac Johnson on a topic “Monetizing Your Blog Beyond the Banner Ads”. I also spoke at WordCamp Raleigh on Speeding up WordPress and Maximizing Performance. This article is a personal reflection of my experience over that trip. I got to meet a lot of cool people, and some old friends as well. Before I say any further, I have to thank our awesome sponsors that stepped up and made this trip possible. Steve Burge from OSTraining was amazing because he stepped up and sponsored our entire trip to WordCamp Raleigh, and partial trip for BlogWorld NYC. Todd Garland from BuySellAds (Our full review), and John Saddington and Standard Theme team which stepped up to cover BlogWorld New York.
Some people I met:
Lewis Howes, Chris Brogan, John Chow, Zac Johnson, Brad Williams, David Henzel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Pirillo (a guy that I met through EmpireAvenue), Jordan Cooper, Adria Richards, David Risley and numerous other rockstar bloggers, developers, and entrepreneurs. Check out some of my pictures:
[slickr-flickr tag=”bweny” items=”27″]
Aside from being a great educational conference, BlogWorld was a lot of fun as well. I networked with a lot of new people and had a blast partying. I also had a blast learning as well. After this BlogWorld, I came back with new goals and list of things I want to improve on. Some of you probably already noticed, that WPBeginner has a new commenting system. Yes, that happened at BlogWorld as well because I met the team behind LiveFyre who gave me the first hand benefits of LiveFyre. There will be a post on WPBeginner about why we switched. Prior to BlogWorld, I was at WordCamp Raleigh, and Patric O’Keefe (@ifroggy) started the conversation and put the name in my head. Then later at BlogWorld totally independently another friend of mine, Lewis Howes, introduced me to the LiveFyre team. As you can see, it is running on the site. If I make the decision that quick, then it must be really freaking good. We did a writeup on some very cool posts, that I am certain you guys will find helpful. Check out the list below:
How this guy went from Zero to One Million Pageviews on his Blog
Breaking the Bell Curve: Standing Out in a Sea of Same
How to stand out in any niche using humor
The Now Revolution: Making Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social
Why more people aren’t reading your blog: How to create Bit Sized content that get devoured and shared
The black, white, and gray of cross linking, reposting, and media rights
Articles from WordCamp Raleigh 2011
Maximizing Performance and Speeding up WordPress (My Presentation)
Designing for the Social Web
Bridging the Designer-Developer Gap
Diet Pills, SEO, and Theme Frameworks: there are no magic bullets
Comment Moderation 201
As I mentioned, I also spoke at BlogWorld Expo. John, Zac, and I decided to have a little fun with our moderator and friend (David Risley) by having read humbling introductions about us. Rob Sutton recorded it on video (tell me if you didn’t get a chuckle out of this):
I had a pleasure attending both events. Michael Torbert, Craig Tuller, and Steve Mortiboy put up another great show at WordCamp Raleigh 2011. They were amazing hosts, and I want to thank them for that. Rick Calvert, Deb Ng, Dave, and the entire BlogWorld team put together another great event. I am proud to stay that I will do my best to attend the next WordCamp Raleigh, and BlogWorld LA later this year.
In the next 2 weeks, I will be attending WordCamp Kansas City, and WordCamp Columbus. I always love meeting WPBeginner readers and ofcourse the entire WordPress community. So if you are coming, then make sure we get a picture together.
Once again, I want to thank these awesome sponsors for making this trip possible. Seriously check them out.
Sponsors
Standard theme is recognized as one of the 8 best premium WordPress themes by Mashable, TheNextWeb called it the slickest WordPress theme ever, and it was also nominated as one of the 25 Best Commercial WordPress themes of 2010 by WPBeginner. With their recent update, Standard Theme now fully supports post formats. Get 15% OFF if you use the coupon “WPBEGIN15“.
BuySellAds is a huge marketplace to buy/sell advertising spots on your site. Over 750 successful bloggers use them to power their online ad sales. WPBeginner is also using BSA to maintain our ads. It is also a great place for advertisers. Over 1,000 quality advertisers use BSA to target the audiences that are right for their brand. If you are interested, apply to be in their marketplace now.
Open Source Training teaches people how to use Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.
Nice meeting you at blogworld!